Politicians Behaving Badly

CBS News posted exclusive video this morning of the subjects of my old Politico beat--the GOP freshmen--hobnobbing with lobbyists at a Key Largo resort. "That's where we caught up with a select group of Republican freshmen, engaged in business as usual," intones CBS anchor Sharyl Attkisson, over undercover camera footage of the lawmakers chatting up the lobbyists in bars and on fishing boats. The footage, CBS wants us to believe, is damning by implication: those GOP revolutionaries who promised to drain D.C.'s swamp are now eager participants in the backslappy culture they campaigned against.

Except...is it really any surprise that a bunch of guys who campaigned as pro-business Republicans are now hanging out with moneyed interests? Is it any more surprising than the fact that the president, who also promised to change Washington, takes big checks from Wall Street? Congressional Democrats, by the way, routinely outraise their Republican counterparts in Congress; that's thanks in large part to Nancy Pelosi, by far the best Democratic fundraiser not named Obama of her generation.

"It's perfectly legal for members of Congress to have a getaway at a Florida resort," Attkisson later notes. "The question is: Why do lobbyists pay thousands of dollars to be here with them? What are the lobbyists getting in return?" And that's really the problem with this piece: it doesn't answer either of those questions. Americans are already convinced that special interests play a corrupting role in politics. What they need now is the type of specificity groups like the Center for Responsive Politics or the Sunlight Foundation do so well--where the money is going, and how it affects legislation--not some grainy footage of lawmakers at a bar that is sure to enrage people without giving them any insight into what's going on.

But the context won't likely matter. The freshmen featured in this video, like Texas Rep. Quico Canseco, Dan Webster of Florida and Nan Hayworth of New York, were elected to swing districts and expect difficult reelection fights. The grainy footage is likely to play in their districts the way their Democratic opponents would hope.

I asked a staffer of one of the members featured in the video how they were dealing with the fall out. "Fire drill," he told me, as his office was being evacuated. "Totally my press strategy."